TELEVISION

TELEVISION; 'Sex' and the Mythic Movie Dream of New York City

By JAMES SANDERS

Published: February 22, 2004

''WELCOME to the age of un-innocence,'' declared Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) at the start of the very first episode of ''Sex and the City,'' six years ago. ''No one has breakfast at Tiffany's, and no one has affairs to remember.'' The reference could not have been plainer. Anxious to give their new series the same jaded, cynical, contemporary tone as the Candace Bushnell stories from which it was drawn, the show's creators were seeking -- almost defiantly -- to distance themselves from the glowing, romantic vision of New York shaped by decades of Hollywood films (including, of course, ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'' and ''An Affair to Remember'').

It didn't quite work out that way. Indeed, as the series' six-season run comes to a much heralded conclusion this evening, it is clear that ''Sex and the City,'' perhaps more than any film or television project of recent decades, has succeeded in re-establishing the vision of a glamorous, mythic New York that had been a fixture in the popular imagination for much of the 20th century: a sophisticated wonderland, replete with nightclubs and cocktails, spacious terraces and skyline views, elegant shopping streets and sidewalks filled with stylish women.

That gleaming filmic metropolis, born with the rise of the talkies in the early 1930's, had been displaced in the late 1960's by what was, in many ways, its exact opposite: the cinematic vision of the city as a gritty urban battleground -- or, at its worst, urban wasteland -- filled with tough-talking ethnic characters whose only common ground seemed to be their distance from mainstream ''American'' values. As the earlier mythic New York had heightened the glamour of the real place, films as varied as ''Taxi Driver,'' ''Death Wish,'' ''Little Murders,'' and ''Escape From New York'' inflated a city struggling with immense social and economic problems into a spectacularly dysfunctional urban environment, separated by an almost unbridgeable gulf from the rest of the country. But in one of the swiftest and most stunning transformations in the history of cities, New York emerged in the mid-1990's from its decades of troubles to become the safest big city in the country -- a burgeoning, prosperous and essentially orderly (indeed, some might say too orderly) metropolis.

In ways obvious and not, the mythic New York of ''Sex and the City'' not only reflected that astonishing change, but restored a vision of the city that had flourished during the 1930's and 40's: a New York that stood not in opposition to the United States but as its apotheosis, the undisputed American metropolis, luring talented and ambitious young people from all around the country. Indeed, in an era when quotas had cut off the flow of foreign immigrants to New York, it was the energies of native-born newcomers that defined the character and spirit of both the real and filmic cities. To a remarkable degree, ''Sex and the City'' recalls that vision of a white Protestant urban culture; at least until the last few seasons, ethnic, foreign-born and African-American characters have tended to occupy marginal roles in the show as work colleagues, love interests or the subjects of ''people on the street'' interviews. The filmic city of the 1960's, '70's and 80's was dominated not only by ethnic characters -- Jewish, Italian, African American, and others -- but also by native-born New Yorkers. Though their origins are not entirely clear, it is obvious that ''Sex and the City's'' four major characters (whose last names -- Bradshaw, Jones, York, Hobbes -- would not look out of place in a white-shoe investment bank) are not native New Yorkers but women who have come to the city from elsewhere and made it their own.

In fact, it is the series' loving focus on its four female leads that links the show most closely and movingly to one of the earliest incarnations of the movie city. In the mid-1930's, in a series of romantic comedies made at Paramount, RKO and Columbia, the weepy or sentimental heroines common to earlier (and later) Hollywood films gave way for a time to what the critic Elizabeth Kendall, in her fine book on the era, ''The Runaway Bride,'' describes as ''loose, successful, eccentric and emotionally unmaimed young women in the city.'' Played by feisty, strong-willed stars like Claudette Colbert, Jean Arthur, Ginger Rogers and Barbara Stanwyck -- actresses whose own personalities, Ms. Kendall notes, ''were related to the city . . . and to the habits of self-preservation that the city required of its citizens,'' these breakthrough characters found their natural home in the vast urban arena of New York, where they could pursue romance and career, and seek to balance conventional social pressure toward matrimony with their own instincts for independence. Like the four friends in ''Sex and the City,'' these women inhabited the metropolis but also personified it; when Ms. Kendall observes that Colbert, for instance, ''projected a certain artificial childlikeness, overlaid with irony -- the essence of big-city sophistication,'' she could be describing Carrie herself.